Today we are excited to announce that Hasim Coskun has joined our team as content creator in order to enhance our websites with more rich and informative content.

Hasim is a IT engineer with main focus on the web. His main skills is development of new web services and loves to play with new web design and graphic arts, which has been a hobby since he was 10 years old. Currently he is working full-time for one of the biggest websites in Europe and he is responsible for both development and search engine optimization. Recently Hasim launched a new blog called, Funofart, which he is spending some time with. Furthermore Hasim has experience with running a company and is currently CEO at Dahii, which is a webdesigner company. When he is not in front of the computer, you can find him playing soccer with his friends or working out at the local gym. Hasim has a wide background from different companies and therefore he has a lot of experience with different programming languages, usability, graphic design and search engine optimisation.

Evan Varsamis
Founder & CEO

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We know you. We understand your passion. You’re positively smitten with gadgets. So we’re excited to announce—Gadget Flow on Steroids!—our wildly streamlined, faster, speedier, better, smarter website with some really cool new features.

Strap on your seat belt. A wild ride is headed your way! We think you’ll love these five new-and-improved features:

1. My Wishlist: You can now log in from the top menu bar using Facebook or Twitter and save your favorite gadgets on a private list. To save, simply, click the “Save” option, located near the “Buy Now” button. To check your saved items, simply go to the top menu and navigate to “My Wishlist”. It’s a snap!

2. Streamlined Design: Our team loves clean code and blazing fast browsing speeds. We had a hunch you would, too. So we have removed the shadows that were creating these annoying 3D effects so now you can experience a flatter, streamlined, and sleeker platform with smoother navigation.

3. Optimized for Speed: We’ve eliminated the speed bumps so that load time averages a mere 1.6 seconds. Don’t you love it?

4. Discuss Comments: Our latest paged version feature allows you to leave a comment on each gadget. Warning! It’s positively addictive. We’d love to know what think on for each of the items we showcase.

5. Bigger Navigation: More Useful pages! We’ve expanded our navigation tab by adding Media Kit, Feedback, Support pages, and more. Take a look around. We think you’ll be impressed with our new full-service site.

More excitement is heading your way in June! We are prepping some really cool new features along with an iPad and Android app that are set to launch in June.

Of course, we could not have done this without your continued support. Thank you for sharing our enthusiasm for gadgets. We get all goofy just thinking about it.

Stay Awesome,

Evan Varsamis
Founder & CEO

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We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Interior Exterior Plan  Blog. We care a lot about quality content and good design and we couldn’t resist the quality of traffic that Interior Exterior Plan has the past years.

Now the team of the blog is joining forces with Cloudie in order to become even more powerful and competitive. We’d like to extend a special thanks to all of our supporters who have advised us, given us priceless feedback and allowed us to expand our Network of websites. While we’ll be working on new Things for IEP make sure you follow our latest fan page and twitter account.

Thank you everyone for the amazing ride so far! Stay tuned!

Evan Varsamis
CEO at Cloudie Co. Media Agency

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If you had enough of those regular flat rectangular bookmarks, then we are sure you will like these creative bookmarks and cool bookmark designs from around the globe. We gathered have gathered some creative bookmarks which are much more fun than a simple browser bookmark. No matter how exciting a book is you have to put it away some time and these creative bookmarks are just a perfect eye-catcher. You can even customise your own and arrange a bookmark printing.

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“If you build it, they will come.”When it comes to creating websites, though, that’s not exactly true. It’s no longer enough to create a website, add your URL to your marketing products and hope that customers log on repeatedly. Not only is it important to have a well-designed and functional site, you need to give customers a reason to come back. You may know how to make your own website, but you need to bring people to it as well.

One way to keep traffic coming to your site is by creating a community around your product, service or site. When your site has a community, visitors feel connected to both your business and others who share their enthusiasm, giving them a reason to stay loyal to your company and return to your site. Encouraging a thriving community around your site also provides some of the best endorsements a company can ask for: happy, satisfied customers who will tell others about you.

Ways to Build a Community

Creating an online community takes time — with so many things competing for a user’s attention, unless the community offers some payoff, they won’t waste time there. There are ways that you can encourage the community and foster the connections between you and your customers.

Enable Comments

One of the easiest ways to build a community is by enabling comments; allow users to comment on blog posts or articles, for example, or add a review feature to your product pages. You can engage with readers via the comments and encourage discussion, and commenters will often talk with each other. In time, you’ll notice that certain commenters appear frequently. These are your most loyal followers, so consider incorporating them more into the community. Perhaps let them serve as a guest blogger or product reviewer for your site.

Use Social Media

Social media have become powerful tools for business owners who want to engage with their customers. By effectively using sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can stay connected with interested customers — and get feedback from them on what they want from you.

Create Forums

Web forums or discussion boards are another one of the most effective ways of adding a community element to your website. Forums give your customers the opportunity to engage in a private environment and have more in-depth discussions about your company, your products and other related topics. For example, a crafts retailer could use forums for customers to share how they use certain products, or an auto parts retailer could sponsor forums for customers to ask questions and receive guidance on car-related issues. Of course, maintaining forums requires some diligence and involvement. Without some guidance and moderation, the forums could veer wildly off topic or never take off at all.

Go Mobile

With so many users now accessing the Web via mobile devices, any business that wants to draw traffic needs a mobile version of its site. When your site is optimized for mobile devices, users can easily share information and participate while they’re on the go. Going mobile isn’t difficult; using mobile website builder software allows you to create a full-functioning mobile site with just a few clicks. Creating a mobile version of the site also keeps your customers engaged in the conversation. For instance, if they comment on a blog post, they can be notified of follow-up comments via e-mail. Then, they can easily respond from wherever they are.

Creating a community around your website gets people talking about your business — in a good way. It takes time and commitment to build a strong community, but the potential for viral-marketing success and repeat customers makes the investment worthwhile. Explore some of your favorite websites to see how successful communities are built, and begin building buzz for your business and products.

About the Author: Daria Towle is a social media and Internet marketing expert who has helped dozens of small businesses reach their online potential. She blogs about Web marketing and best practices for several publications.

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Email marketing is a new trend in the internet, in which you must have a landing page where there is information regarding your email. Whenever they click the link in the email, it leads them to your landing page where there is complete information for your entire campaign. It is where the customer takes information for contact for any product in which he is interested. A great website that you can start your email marketing today is 123 Reg which I strongly recommend. Also another great website is Mailchimp.

It is very important, that the landing page of your email campaign must be appealing and attractive for the viewers. It must convey your message to the viewers and should give you a bunch of potential customers who are willing to buy and test your product. For that there are several aspects in which it must prove its worth.

Be your own customer

In order to create the best and most appealing packages, you must imagine yourself as your own customer. You must understand what the needs of the common people can be who visit your website. You must create special offers and packages which will prove to be appealing to the viewer and force him to pick the mouse and click that link to your landing page.

Benefits!

In case of email marketing as well as business, you must keep your focus at the positive aspect. Similarly, when composing a landing page for your email marketing campaign, you must keep your focus at the advantages that the customers will receive after buying your product, keep the focus at the packages and offers that you are presenting to the people, they will flock to your landing page like sheep.

Past Customers

Try taking and posting testimonials from your previous successful and satisfied customers. They always prove to be a very important factor that determines how many more potential customers you will be able to attract from your email marketing. This is so because people will truly understand and believe more what a third person says who has had similar needs as they have had.

Easy methods of contact

Clearly depict shortcuts on your page which mention from where the customer may contact you for support and ordering purposes. It is clear that the customer has no idea what address have you set and shortcuts for contact, and therefore clearly depict it on your landing page so as to make it easy for the customer. Make it attractive, such as ‘Call free on this toll number 111-888-888!’ Along with that, do remember to mention complete contacting information on your page. You definitely don’t want to frustrate your valuable customers in simple issues as to how to contact you. Therefore, give shortcuts for contacting on your home page and mention complete methods of ordering and contact so that your email marketing campaign can gain more and more popularity.

Email marketing can be a success for you if you simply oblige to these above techniques. They simply will help you in achieving a successful email marketing career and give you success in your business.

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Download the awesome Desktop and iPhone wallpaper of our Network and customize your devices. Below you will find a 2000×1000 version of our logo for your desktops but also the iPhone 4S Retina Version for your Mobiles devices.

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The first question you need to ask is the importance of having an efficiently/Responsive web design that represents your company’s profile. A study by Compuware has found that almost 57% of users will never recommend a company with a bad website. Considering that more and more people are using mobiles to access internet, companies that do not have a good mobile website will suffer. The same study also found 40% of the people will prefer to use a competitor’s website rather than using a poorly designed one.

A Brief Evolution of Web Design

Website design started in the early 1990’s. At the beginning all the websites were text based. The text was written in a single column using HTML. It was during these times, in 1994, that the World Wide Web consortium was formed. In the mid-1990’s table based website designing allowed for a website to contain multiple columns. The content could now be organized in a better manner.

Several new design improvements were made. Images could be added to the website. Flash was introduced in 1996. The late 1990’s saw an increased use of flash to make websites more attractive. Animation and navigational features based on flash started to appear in websites. It was during this time that PHP3 was released, in 1998.

The year of 2000 could also be called the year of CSS. It took website designing by storm. Now website content and website design could be separated from each other.  The early to late 2000’s saw the rise of JavaScript. JavaScript now replaced tables for designing of the layout. The mid 2000’s saw the introduction of the semantic web.

Semantic web is basically a web design movement whose aim is to increase the capacity of machines in understanding websites to human levels. The XML language is a step in the right direction towards realizing this goal.

Web 2.0 was introduced in the late 2000’s. Developers now made use of JavaScript, XML and Ajax to build more interactive websites. HTML5 was also introduced during this time.

Mobile Web

Mobile web is another aspect of web designing that has been growing very rapidly. So far, we’ve had to mostly make separate websites for each and every device type there is. Mobile phone screens are smaller and have lower resolution than computer screens.

The same website will not work on both in an optimum and presentable manner. That is why separate WAP sites are made for mobile phone screens. However, with the increasing number of devices with web access, and all with varying physical dimensions and specifications, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make multiple websites to serve all the customers.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley claim that the world is currently going through fifth technological revolution since the last 50 years. This one is based on the evolution of mobile internet. They also claim that the number of people using mobile devices to access internet will cross those using computers by 2015. Get these free useful cheatsheets in web design.

Need for Responsive Web Design

Besides mobile phones and computers, these days internet can also be accessed via e-readers, netbooks, tablets, televisions and gaming consoles. It is just not feasible to make websites for each and every one of them. Even now, according to Mongoose Metrics, only around 9% of the total numbers of required mobile websites are up and running.

Won’t it be simpler to have just a single website that could work everywhere? Responsive web design technology does exactly this.

What is Responsive Web Design?

A website that is designed to established standards laid down for responsive web designing will be able to adopt its design and layout to fit the specifications of the device calling it. It does this by dynamically adopting to different screen sizes and by reformatting the positioning and look of the constituent elements of the website.

So what may appear to be a website with large images spread through three columns on a computer screen, will appear to have smaller images in a single column on a mobile screen. All of this does not need multiple codes written for each type of device. A single set of code which accepts various specification parameters from the device will do the job. CSS3 is used to give the generated website the desired look and feel.

The Core Elements

Responsive web design is built around three main elements. They are:

• Fluid grids,
• Fluid images, and
• Media Queries

Fluid Grids

The general practice in web design is to employ fixed width layouts. It means that the page and its constituent elements have a fixed size and width and positioned around the center. Liquid layouts offer us a greater advantage with the increasing number of devices with web access. A liquid layout expands with the page.

A better version of the same is the fluid grid layout. A fixed width layout is based on rigid pixel values while the liquid layout is concerned with percentage values. A fluid grid layout is based on proportions. When a particular layout is either squeezed or stretched then apart from altering their sizes, all the constituent elements of the page will alter their widths with respect to each other.

Fluid Images

No web page is complete without some images. However, introducing fixed width photos into a flexible grid layout may result in the photo overflowing from the container and spoiling the entire page if the container is not big enough. An image is made into a fluid image by putting some constraints on it, such as constraints prohibiting it from exceeding the size of its container.

Media Queries

Fluid grid layouts are very important for responsive web development, but there are other issues to consider. If the width of the device becomes too narrow, like in a small mobile phone, the website design can fall apart. This is where media queries come in. These media queries are based in CSS3 and allow us to not only target the particular device classes but physical characteristics of the device which is rendering the web site.

Benefits of using Responsive Web Design

You may or may not be familiar with the concept of responsive web design. But one thing is for certain – your website needs it to serve the growing number of customers who use devices other than the computer to access the internet.

Responsive web design allows for optimal viewing of your website across all devices. Here are the top advantages to be gained out of using responsive web design.

• With responsive web design you’ll be making your website accessible to people 24/7. A lot of your customers will constantly be on the move. In fact, this is one reason why people are turning towards mobile devices to access the web. If your website is not accessible to this sizable chunk of customers or potential customers, then your business has a lot to lose and your competitors have a lot to gain. Don’t let that happen to your business.
• Websites meant for mobile devices are usually very Spartan and do not have advanced navigational features, such as in websites for computers. Your customers do not want to waste time in looking for features in a poorly designed mobile website. They’d rather go over to competitor’s website. Responsive web design helps you to prevent such a scenario by making viewing a site from a mobile device almost as efficient a process as viewing the same site from a computer.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another great reason to go for responsive web design. In any website, one needs links to help the visitors get to the right part of the website. However, if separate websites were made for each kind of device out there – one for computers and laptops, another for tablets, another for mobiles etc, we’d have a lot of links on our hands. Each such link has to be redirected via the server and will add unnecessary load on the server. Additionally, each such link also needs to be specific to the user agent in order to get the visitors to the right part of the website. This will adversely affect the website speed and increase maintenance hassles. Responsive web design helps us to eliminate this issue by having just one website and just one set of links to handle.

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Optimizing your WordPress website can be painful, There are so many different options and combination to choose from that makes it impossible for the standard user to have a super charged website. The main issue with most of the WordPress blog owners is simple. They think that by starting a self-hosted website it will be fast flexible and it wont need any maintenance or advanced skills which is wrong. Creating a website that is self hosted is kind of easy but having it running fast, secure and without downtimes its not.

After my website’s huge re-design I have developed my WordPress optimization skills in a level that I can easily help someone with his/her website. I’ve written this tutorial in plain english in order to be understandable and readable by people with the basic knowledge of english. Also I will provide detailed information about each step that I ll make in order to wonder why I did that which was my main issue while I was researching for tutorials on how to optimize my own website.

Requirements
Starting with the basics in order for this tutorial to be effective you need to have the following.

A Shared Hosting Server
Basic Knowledge of the WordPress Platform
At Least $25 available to purchase Cloudflare Pro

Speed Test Websites

• http://gtmetrix.com/
• http://www.webpagetest.org/
• http://tools.pingdom.com

Godaddy shared hosting has done a huge update to their servers in 2010 which made them quite faster than before but still, having a shared hosted website in Godaddy with out any custom optimizations or speed optimization services makes it simply a slow website.

There are many cheap and expensive solutions out there that you can follow but the thing is that you cant be sure that they will work for sure with your selected theme and settings so the only choice you have is to try different combinations like I did and find what works best for you.

2.0 W3 Total Cache Plugin
Download W3 Total Cache Plugin and install it, (Download it Here)
the basic configurations are fine do not change anything if you are not sure of what you are doing.

So when you activate the plugin all of the settings are disabled. If you see any strange message that says something like “Permissions are not writable” either for .Htaccess file or for the wp-contents folder then you have to go through your favorite FTP Application and change the permissions of these folders to either 644 or 755, this will do the trick. (After you finish with the setup make sure you add the default permissions back)

Minifying Javascript and CSS
Most of the websites out there deliver various files of javascript and css while the website loads and so it takes more time to download 10 javascript files 1 by 1 than just 1 solid file. Same goes for the CSS stylesheets and so the solution is to combine Javascript into 1-2 files and CSS into 1 file which will cause dramatically speed increase and decrease your server load.

From the General Settings Tab Enable Minify and set it to auto (Choose Disk Enhance)

Page Cache
Enable page cache and decrease the response time (time to first byte) of your website. Keep the default settings and do not play with the values.

Database Caching
I would really recommend leaving database and Object Cache disabled if you are on a shared hosting and thats because you can only use disk cache and this will slow down your website instead of making it faster.

Content Delivery Network
What is content delivery network(CDN)? Well there are many services that offer CDN on the web but I would strongly recommend MaxCDN. So this service has tens of servers around the globe that hosts your files there and serve them to the nearest server your visitors are. So if your main server is in San Francisco and your visitor from Amsterdam he will pull your website’s files from Amsterdam which will result faster loading times.

The catch is the price though. Most of the CDN Services cost a lot but not if you have less than 300.000 page-views per month. Personally I wouldn’t recommend CDN for a website that has less than 1M traffic/Month because its a pretty expensive solution. Usually the rates goes as follows.

Browser Cache
By Enabling browser cache you reduce the server’s loading time. Again leave the default options on and do not play with the values.

3.0 Setting up Cloudflare
Go to Cloudflare (Click here) and Create an Account. Then go into this website (Link) and watch the tutorial on how to setup your DNS Settings really quick UNTILL STEP 10. (Do not go any further). You don’t actually need to download any other plugins to setup your Cloudflare account

Choosing the right settings for your Cloudflare Account.
Heres the deal, Cloudflare promises security which is a great thing but I have observed many complains on the web about Cloudflare’s security that locks normal visitors out of websites or either ask them to fill out a captcha before they go into the website which is not good and effective so I would strongly recommend not to enable security options.

Settings Overview
Development mode: OFF
Automatic IPv6: OFF
Outbound Links: OFF
Always Online: OFF
IP Geolocation: OFF
Google analytics: ON
SSL: OFF

Security Tab
Basic Protection: OFF
Challenge Passage TTL: 1 Week
Email Address Obfuscation: ON
Server side exclude (SSE): OFF
Browser integrity check: OFF
Hotlink Protection: OFF
Advanced security (Firewall): OFF

Performance Profile
Caching Level: Simplified
Minimum Expire TTL: 16 Days
Auto Minify: OFF (You already minifying your JS and CSS with W3TC)
Rocket Loader: Automatic (This one rocks)
Website Pre-loader: ON (Amazing Performance)
Polish Image Optimization: (Still in beta) 70

Now in order to have the website pre-loader and the polish image optimization you will have to pay about $26/month and if you ask me, Yes! its worth it because these 2 little options there will have a huge impact to your server’s loading time.

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